The invention relates to virtual environment systems, and more particularly to a method for optimizing the storage allocation in a virtual desktop environment.
Computer virtualization has become one of the more important technologies for different sized companies. Computer virtualization increases the computational efficiency and flexibility of a computing hardware platform. Using, in particular, storage virtualization in a virtual desktop environment is also becoming a critical part of business computing in these companies.
In a Virtual Desktop environment, the local file system assigned for each desktop is a chunk of dedicated virtualized storage taken from a physical storage pool. Each time a user saves a file to his/her file system, a copy of this file is stored on the dedicated chunk of physical storage for that desktop. In the case where several virtual desktop users, belonging to the same business context, are saving the same file to their file system, the result is that several copies of that same file are likely to be stored on the common physical storage. This redundancy causes unnecessary usage of extra storage, thereby making it necessary to acquire larger storage volumes than actually required.
Another problem related to the usage of other state of the art systems is that the users have to use a predefined or shared directory tree structures and are not able to store their files in a user-specified location. The users of such systems are also not able to modify the directory structure of the shared storage volume as this would confuse other users assuming their files to be still available via the original file path.